Date of Award

Spring 6-12-2020

Document Type

Honors Project

University Scholars Director

Dr. Christine Chaney

First Advisor/Committee Member

Dr. Jennifer Maier

Second Advisor/Committee Member

Dr. Traynor Hansen

Keywords

Virginia Woolf, Modernism, Urban Experience, Flâneur, Domestic Space, Interiority

Abstract

In this project I explore Virginia Woolf’s modernist preoccupation with representing ordinary, female life in her fiction. Reading her novel Mrs. Dalloway alongside some of her more explicitly feminist essays, I analyze the way that her female protagonist, Clarissa, navigates the physical world around her, and why the spaces she occupies are so crucial to her character. Because I am primarily interested in the question of feminine space, this project is divided in two parts that respectively explore Clarissa’s relationship with the “outside” world of the city and the “inside” world of her home. It is my belief that by making a physical space on the page for the everyday woman, Woolf celebrates the often trivialized experiences of domesticity and femininity while simultaneously expanding the definition of what it means to have a novel-worthy story.

Comments

A project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the University Scholars Honors Program.

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